And what went on in the home apart from eating? There were the usual pastimes of course, and one of the pastimes, was letter-writing. This came about and it is a bit of a longish story.
A couple of generations before my time there were schools around the country, that had been set up by the government and they had only just started. The courses were elementary sort of things. They taught chiefly writing, reading and arithmetic, and one paid a few pence a week to be able to attend these schools.
They were called British Schools, and I understand, there was one in Wokingham in Milton Road, which is now occupied by Martin & Pole as their sale room. Writing was taught by means of a copy book so that everybody copied the same lines of letters. I remember I had a copy book when I first went to school and that’s how I first learned to write. But that was upset later on.
Ken—That’s where we get the term, copy book writing.
Cecil—Yes, and although everybody learned to make their letters the same way when once they had learned, their own personality took over. I remember my mother wrote a very legible hand, but it was much more flowery than my father’s, which was very small and neat—Civil Service style, I think it was called. But pretty well everybody in the town by spending a short while in the British School, could learn to write. So that, at the turn of the century, it was quite an art that everybody knew.
The Post
This, accompanied by the fact that Rowland Hill had just produced his penny post, prompted people to write letters to one another and send them by the penny post.
I well remember in 1914, a number of years after that, it was still a penny post. One had a red penny stamp on letters and a green ha’penny stamp on postcards or unsealed letters. Provided one posted one’s letters in the main post office before five o’clock in the afternoon, it was pretty well guaranteed that your letter would be delivered anywhere in England, Scotland and Wales first thing next morning. It was a very good system.
Of course it has been abused. The quantity of post passing through the post is so much that, despite all the gadgets they’ve got, is too much to keep up the standard.
But letters were delivered twice a day by a postman who wore a uniform. You never saw a postman in his own clothes. He always wore a dark blue uniform and a peculiar sort of helmet and he would put the letters through your letter box and rat tat on the door. The postman’s rat tat was recognised everywhere—Wokingham, Warwick—any other place in the country. The funny thing about that—in those days—when one had a letter box in one’s front door, there was always a knocker attached to the letterbox for the post so he could knock. That was the means of communication.
Another thing was that typewriters were not in general use so even business houses used handwritten letters and they went by penny post.